Hippo

Hippo Digital Limited are a digital services partner that champions evidence-based design and delivery, putting people first when it comes to digital service design.

With their strapline that talks about ‘designing with empathy and building for impact’, it’s easy to see how a partnership between Optimo and Hippo could be a match made in heaven.  

 Danielle (our Founder) connected with some Hippo colleagues at local sustainability-related networking events. She was interested to hear about their social value focus as an organisation and to learn about a new ‘green hippo forum’ they were developing internally, as an extension of an existing, growing champion volunteer network, with the specific responsibility for planning and prioritising sustainability initiatives within the business.  

Champion or change-agent networks and forums are a really effective model for creating and embedding change in an organisation in an inclusive and engaging way. It draws upon the enthusiasm and skills from across all areas of a business and maximises the peer-to-peer influence that can often reach those that top-down implementation styles may not.  

There are wider-reaching benefits of this approach too. Culturally, when employees are empowered to have a say in the direction that the business is taking, or the way the business operates, they are more likely to engage positively in other aspects of their role too. They’re more likely to stick around longer. This reduces attrition and improving the quality of service offered to clients.  

It’s important to genuinely enable that empowerment, though. Any red tape and approval processes that get in the way of their action can affect progress. It can also dampen enthusiasm for further contribution, making this change model redundant.  

Danielle was delighted to support the newly formed green forum in their early stages. She facilitated virtual whiteboard sessions for the group, to help with their ideation and scoping for sustainability initiatives they could implement. 

 These sessions included some fantastic conversations around ways they could work with suppliers and clients, as well as things they could do themselves.  

 Once a long list of initiative ideas had been created, the group chose individual initiatives to work through one-by-one. They scoped further detail around how to get each idea off the ground, answering the following questions: 

• What steps does this involve? – What is the scope of this piece of work, Any timescales or dependencies 

• Who needs to be involved? – Who will be responsible, accountable, consulted and informed) 

• What supporting tools are needed? – What data, information, systems, templates, frameworks do we need? 

• What impact will it have? – What is the social or environmental impact, give an idea of size of impact, consider cost / disbenefits too 

• Other thoughts – What else do we need to think about?